Jonathan Bloom: American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It)

From the blog, "Wasted Food" (maintained by Jonathan Bloom): Americans waste more than 40 percent of the food we produce for consumption. That comes at an annual cost of more than $100 billion. At the same time, food prices and the number of Americans without enough to eat continues to rise. Fusing my journalistic research on the topic with the work of countless others, this site examines how we squander so much food. Part blog, part call to action, Wasted Food aims to shed light on the problem of, you guessed it, wasted food. I’ve been researching this topic since 2005, when two experiences made me aware of just how much food is wasted. Volunteering at D.C. Central Kitchen, a homeless shelter that rescues unused food from restaurants and supermarkets illuminated the excess in those areas. Gleaning, or gathering crops that would otherwise be left in the field and distributing them to the hungry, illustrated the agricultural abundance that is often plowed under. When you’re looking for it, you see food waste everywhere–at restaurants, in large portions and even in your own refrigerator. If more and more people recognize their own food waste, we can take a bite out of this problem. Hope you’re hungry for change.





From the author's website, JonathanBloom.net: Jonathan is a freelance journalist who lives in Durham, N.C. The Boston native enjoys covering both serious and quirky topics related to food, the environment, business and the intersection of the three. He has written about subjects ranging from Internet voting to vehicles that run on used vegetable oil.





From The Miami Herald: We all do it. Each year, Americans waste an estimated 160 billion pounds of food - enough to fill the Rose Bowl to the brim, according to Jonathan Bloom, author of "American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food (and What We Can Do About It)." Because an estimated 40 percent of food waste comes from our homes, we all can do better. Near the top of my list of New Year's resolutions is wasting less food. So I asked Bloom, whose book came out this fall, for advice. The seeds of food thriftiness were first planted in Bloom by his mother, a woman who always took home doggie bags from restaurants and for whom no leftover was too small to save. Home is where he learned the practice of turning an array of leftovers into an occasional smorgasbord dinner. Bloom, 34, who received his master's degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, started researching this book in 2005 after working at a food recovery operation in Washington, D.C. During those five years, he has evolved from a person who was taught to understand the value of food to someone who is actively trying to avoid wasting it.



On The Huffington Post, in "How Avoiding Food Waste Aids Our Environment," the author wrote this: There are ethical and economic reasons why we shouldn't waste food. But, putting those aside, the environmental impacts alone make our national culture of waste unpalatable. A tremendous amount of resources go into growing our food. And processing, shipping, cooling and cooking it. A recent study from the University of Texas at Austin professors Amanda D. Cuellar and Michael E. Webber found that two percent of all U.S. energy consumption goes into producing food that is ultimately thrown out. That's the equivalent of 350 million barrels of oil. Worst of all, the two percent figure is a very conservative finding, as the study's authors noted. It's based on the low-end estimate of food's energy usage. Plus, the waste percentage the researchers use is ancient -- OK, mid 90s -- finding that we waste 27 percent of all our food. The most recent estimate is 40 percent, which comes from an NIH study. Using that more up-to-date waste percentage and the most recent estimate of how much energy food production gobbles, our food waste could represent as much as six percent of U.S. energy consumption.

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food

For most cooks, food is a question of how. How many teaspoons? How many pounds? How many degrees? For geeks, food is fundamentally a question of why. Instead of "How do I brine a turkey?" it's "Why does osmosis push moisture back into the bird?" Instead of "How should I brown these potatoes?" it's "Why does a Maillard reaction make food tasty?" Food geek Jeff Porter delves into these questions and more in his book "Cooking for Geeks" (O'Reilly, $34.99), an excellent walk through the science of food and the basic techniques to turn that knowledge into flavor. Now, to be sure, Harold McGee (who appears in an interview in the book) traveled down the science portion of this path already in his seminal "On Food and Cooking." But Porter taps into the trend of food experimentation and gadgetry that has invaded our kitchens. "Overly intellectual. Obsessed with details. Going beyond the point where a mainstream user would stop," Porter writes. "A geek is anyone who dwells with some obsession on why something works and how to make that something better. And it's become a badge of honor to be a geek."

That's out of The Herald, in Monterey, California. You can find the rest of that article here.

Food Waste Is Economic Waste, And It's Happening In Huge Volumes

In "Common sense ways to reduce food waste," Tom Watson out of the Seattle Times notes:

Food waste is a significant problem all year around. An average American family of four wastes more than $2,200 worth of food each year, says Jonathan Bloom, a North Carolina-based food-waste expert. In his new book, "American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It)," Bloom describes environmental and social impacts from food waste, including the resources used to transport and dispose of it and the constant need for food at food banks. Food makes up about 18 percent of the residential waste going into King County's Cedar Hills Landfill. Wasted food from restaurants, supermarkets and farms also contributes to the overall problem referred to in Bloom's title. During the holidays, we generate three times as much food waste as normal, according to Timothy Jones, a former University of Arizona anthropology researcher who has studied food waste since the 1990s.

See that Seattle Times piece here. The Boston Globe also wrote of the author and his book:

From a young age, Jonathan Bloom was taught to respect food. His family valued the nightly ritual of eating dinner together, he said, and always worked good restaurants into vacations. “I’ve always been interested in food as something to be enjoyed, but also to be treasured as a bit of a special commodity,’’ said Bloom, a journalist who has contributed to the Globe’s food and travel sections. In his new book, “American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (And What We Can Do About It),’’ Bloom identifies some large-scale culprits, such as all-you-can-eat buffets and farmers who intentionally plow under crops that can’t make a profit. But he also notes how much food the average American household tosses out. “The overarching thing is to not take food for granted,’’ said Bloom, adding that wise shopping and a reasonable disregard for sell-by dates can easily reduce everyday waste.

See that Globe piece here.